The Inside Story Of Polygon, The Verge's New Gaming Sister-Site

Nearly one year ago, the world of online media scratched its collective head as the sports blogging network SB Nation launched a new, decidedly non-sports site called The Verge. While it may have seemed like an odd leap at the time, The Verge, founded with a wealth of  talent departing from the AOL-owned Engadget, attacked tech blogging with quality content and a striking, original design.

After 12 months of growth and widespread acclaim, The Verge now has a new younger sibling, the gaming-focused blog Polygon, which launched late Wednesday night. Polygon, with a star-studded cast (at least in the video game blogging world) that includes the former editors-in-chief at three top competitors, is the latest big move for Vox Media, the relatively new parent company of SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon.

Vox, a completely digital enterprise, is launching sites at the deliberate pace at which one might publish a new print magazine. And that’s the point. The story of Polygon is one that stretches back two years, to before The Verge launched, and includes a nearly 10-month design and development process.

It began with a rejected pitch in the spring of 2011. Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, a former AOL executive, approached Christopher Grant, then editor-in-chief for the AOL video game blog Joystiq, about an opportunity to start a new site. He promised a serious commitment to online journalism in an age when content farms dominate and 80-year-old publications cut off printing. It was a “Narnia” that Grant just didn’t believe could actually exist.

“A new publisher is going to come along and invest money in editors and journalists and pay money for that stuff, when the trend for years was Demand Media?” Grant said in an interview with Forbes. “Everyone thought, well our jobs are kind of worthless now. We’re just going to ride it out with whatever publisher we’re with now until they go out of business, and then we’ll flip burgers. There’s a cynic in everybody, especially in online journalism.”

But The Verge changed Grant’s mind. Rather than simply throw together some off-the-shelf software and hire a few writers, Bankoff and the Vox team built the new blog from scratch, starting with their in-house Chorus content management system that powers SB Nation’s 300+ blogs. Grant saw how the site was designed to enable custom longform content and video to seamlessly come together—and it had the staff to make good on Bankoff’s original pitch. Led by Engadget editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky, The Verge has excelled with visually-impressive reviews and documentary-quality original videos, while attracting sponsors like BMW and Microsoft. Quantcast estimates that the infant site had more than 12 million visits in the last month, and it’s growing rapidly.

Even before The Verge launched to the public in November 2011, Grant realized his mistake. With sneak-peaks at the quality of the content, the design, the technology, and the lineup of big-brand advertisers, he saw that his skepticism was misguided. “It was the execution of the promise I had heard previously,” he said. “It made me think, who’s the dipsh*t here? Is it the guys that are promising the moon and doing it, or the guy who’s looking for any chink in the armor?”

So Grant came back to Bankoff and Vox. This time he had to pitch them.

In January 2012, Grant left Joystiq, bringing a few staff members along with him to the new, unnamed venture. He recruited Brian Crecente and Russ Pitts, the editors-in-chief at Kotaku and The Escapist, respectively, and ultimately assembled a full-time staff of 16 editors and reporters—they’re still hiring—tasked with breaking news, reviewing games, and writing features about the human element behind the $25 billion video game industry. Everything from choosing the right name to establishing rigorous standards of reporting was hammered out over the last 10 months, a process that the Vox team documented in a series of videos called “Press Reset”. The site was especially tough to develop, since it’s powered with an HTML5-responsive web design that adjusts to fit the laptop, tablet, or cell phone screen on which you access it.

Grant, a carpenter before he became a journalist, relished the chance to build something special from the ground up. “Most outlets aren’t doing magazine-style journalism about games,” he said. “They aren’t doing longform 9,000 word stories on two creative people building a video game. We wanted to make content that was historically meaningful, that 100 years from now someone can find valuable.”

With Polygon, Grant thinks he can not only beat his former employer, but go toe-to-toe with the biggest players in the online gaming world, Gamespot and IGN. It’s a goal that requires not just the right writers, but also a revenue model to back them up. SB Nation and The Verge have broken through the noise of most online advertising by setting up direct content sponsorships in which big brands can, for example, advertise around a specific video series, connecting with precisely the quality and direction of editorial that they want. The fact that the sites largely avoid the much-derided practices of aggregators and content farms in favor of building passionate communities (be they fans of the Philadelphia Eagles or the Android operating system), also helps attract magazine-quality advertisers.

Polygon launches out of the box with backers in Geico, Sony, and Unilever. They hope to attract more of those kind of sponsors going forward, but Grant knows that they have to earn it by producing the quality of experience of which he was initially skeptical. With The Verge as a guide, he’s a convert. But what about everyone else?

“What I always think is, if we die, at least we’ll leave a beautiful corpse,” Grant said.

You can visit the official welcome note at Polygon now.

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